SPUG: email addresses in the archives

Kurt Buff kurt.buff at gmail.com
Fri Feb 19 13:52:41 PST 2010


On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 13:42, Bill Campbell <bill at celestial.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 19, 2010, Andrew Sweger wrote:
>>The SPUG mailing list (spug-list) is hosted and (primarily) archived by
>>Perl Mongers using the mailman mail-list manager. The archives are open to
>>the public. The issue of privacy and email addresses in those archives was
>>brought to my attention. When something that looks like an email address
>>appears in an address header or body of a message, the archiving software
>>replaces it so it doesn't look like an email address. So,
>>andrew at sweger.net becomes andrew at sweger.net. Of course, if you look at
>>the archive with *this* message[1], it won't look like anything has
>>changed at all. Any mailto links put over the address point to the mailing
>>list. The complaint is that s/\@/ at / is not a sufficient obfuscation to
>>reduce harvesting of email addresses by spammer. We could have quite a
>>nice debate on this. I said we _could_.
>>
>>I took the matter to the Perl Mongers support folks. Robert Spier says our
>>options are:
>>
>>1) switch the archives to private - members only
>>2) someone contributes a patch to mailman to perform better/different obfuscation
>>3) do nothing
>>
>>I have my opinions on this, but it's not my list (I'm just it's
>>control-freak dictator). What do y'all think?
>
> Do nothing.

Agreed.

Kurt


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